EVEN AFTER CONCEDING that the Union Budget 2014-15 presented to Parliament and the nation on July 10 by new finance minister Arun Jaitley, is a truncated statement of accounts for the next seven months of the current financial year of the 60-days-old BJP-led National Democratic Alliance (NDA) government, it’s a great disappointment. There’s hardly any departure from predecessor budgets despite the people of India having “decisively voted for a change”, and the verdict of the electorate representing “the exasperation of the people with the status quo” as proclaimed by Jaitley in his 2.20-hour maiden budget speech.

The exasperation of the people is that like his predecessors, Jaitley has failed to grasp that there’s more to the Union budget than mere presentation of a statement of government revenue and expenditure of the year past and a forecast of income and expenditure in the year to come. The Union budget is also an analytical and policy document which should take the people into confidence explaining why grandiose plans announced previously haven’t fructified, and identify the development priorities of the Central government. The finance minister’s speech fails on both these counts.

According to the finance ministry’s website (www.indiabudget.nic.in), the Union government’s non-development expenditure (what it spends by establishment salaries, perks and maintenance costs) aggregated Rs.11.14 lakh crore in 2013-14. Against this, it mobilised Rs.9.77 lakh crore through taxation and Rs.2.12 lakh crore through non-tax revenue aggregating Rs.11.89 lakh crore as revenue receipts. To fund capital investments, it resorts to issuing high-yield interest bearing bonds purchased by the public.

Last year, the Centre borrowed Rs.5.24 lakh crore, and for 2014-15 it has budgeted Rs.5.31 lakh crore. In effect, it prints paper money equivalent to these huge amounts (equal to the fiscal deficit) and injects it into the economy, fuelling inflation year after year. The result is that the cumulative interest payout of the Central government was a massive Rs.3.80 lakh crore last year (almost 40 percent of its annual tax revenue) and is budgeted at Rs.4.27 lakh crore in 2014-15.

It’s patently obvious that a top priority of any government should be retirement of the Centre’s Rs.3.80 lakh crore (six times the Centre’s outlay for education in 2013-14) annual interest payout burden. An easy option on hand is to periodically stage global auctions to dispose of some or all of the Central government’s 251 bleeding public sector (business) enterprises (PSEs) and retire a substantial chunk of the public debt. There’s some awareness of this option and in his budget for 2014-15, Jaitley proposes to raise Rs.63,000 crore by selling equity shares of PSEs, a half-hearted measure given the assets of PSEs are estimated at over Rs.1000,000 crore.

It’s a pity — indeed a national curse — that yet another government voted into office by the country’s desperate electorate is mired in the dreary desert sand of dead habit.

Academy must resist saffronisation

FEARS THAT THE landslide victory of the BJP in General Election 2014 would result in the influence of the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS) — the ideological and cultural parent of the BJP — spreading within the academy are beginning to be realised. On July 3, the newly-installed BJP-led NDA government appointed Yellapragada Sudershan Rao, president of the Bharatiya Itihaasa Sankalana Samithi, an RSS-affiliated organisation committed to writing history from a Hindu nationalist perspective, as director of the Indian Council of Historical Research (ICHR, estb. 1973). The appointment of Rao, whose current research project is to discover the definitive date of the Kaurava-Pandava war described in the Mahabharata, confirms the hold that RSS, which has a record of Hindu assertiveness and anti-minorities prejudice, has over the BJP. It’s a signal that the process of ‘saffronisation’ of Indian history and education has begun. Ominously the newly appointed Union human resource development (HRD) minister Smriti Irani has also announced plans to give a “Hindu perspective” to school curriculums and include “ancient Hindu texts” in the syllabus of classes VIII-X.

This early effort to rewrite “Left-leaning” textbooks — especially history texts — has aroused memories of the attempts of the first BJP-led NDA government at the Centre to “saffronise” school education during its term in office (1999-2004). During those years, Union HRD minister and RSS elder Dr. Murli Manohar Joshi commissioned an extensive revision of NCERT social science textbooks to accommodate the RSS interpretation of history and Hindu mythology, provoking protest from academics and opposition parties. Now ten years on, with the BJP back in power — and this time with an absolute majority in the Lok Sabha — this project which was left unfinished following the surprise defeat of the BJP/NDA in the general election of 2004, has been restarted.

With the hardly two-months-old BJP government seemingly determined to revise history and social science texts to propagate its hindutva agenda, the onus of separating grain from chaff and myth from facts has devolved upon teacher and academic communities, who need to be vigilant about propagating blatant distortions of history. Given the reality that most academic texts are replete with government and establishment propaganda, teachers — and especially parents — need to sift facts from fiction and myths from realities by accommodating ‘counter-curriculums’.

Simultaneously, it’s high time the nation’s passive and receptive academic community and in particular the 5 million school teachers became constructively engaged with education policy formulation, textbooks preparation and approval. The pressure of academic and public opinion is the best bulwark for stalling the new government’s saffronisation agenda, and to force it to focus on the real issues of Indian education.